Now what do you think that this means? I have never read any such thing from Michael Hardt or Antonio Negri. It certainly cant mean that Hardt and Negri dont support strikes, etc or that Hardt and Negri dont support workers struggles against capital, Because that isn't true. So what does it mean?
It is true that the industrial working class is not considered the only or primary element of the proleteriat. However, that said, Hardt and Negri dont deny the existence or the revolutionary potential of the industrial working class. There are various groupings that seek liberation from capitalism. Rather than unite behind a Party which seeks to mediate for these various tendancies who have their own needs and desires; these streamlets should be autonomous and affirm their own needs and wants without mediation from a Leninist type party. That does not mean that there will not be collaboration between these various groupings or joint actions...just that they will not be orchestrated from some body outside of themselves. They are autonomous.
That is one definition of autonomy. So basically the discussion is not whether or not Hardt and Negri support labor. The question is who are the revolutionary subjects and how are they organized to fight for their desires, wnats, needs, liberation. Is a Leninist party the way..in which the various groupings are subsumed under one party which mediates for them in a party and then a State (so called unity which is more like sufforcation)...Or are autonomous revolutionary subjects fighting for their own interests and liberation the way to go?
Do Hardt and Negri think that manual labor has disappeared as this person suggests? NO! They do think that the increase of immaterial labor is conducive to permitting the groupings to build exchange and production outside of capital. Instead of seizing State power with a party that mediates on behalf of the various revolutinary groupings (multitudes is the term they use), they propose a desertion or exodus from capital in which capitalism would just collapse. We have recently discussed some embryonic forms of desertion in the thread on "anarchism and color." So, this is another component of autonomy...autonomy from capital.
Anyway, people are free to agree or disagree on the validity of "autonomy". However, I suggest that people read the autonomists and get a clear idea how autonomists define the term rather than rely on someone like Brennan who chooses to make up his own definition of the term and then attack that.
<<the nation-state, we are told, has lost all sovereignty. >>
No, they say that Empire is emergent. Meaning that the tendancy is towards Empire. At the advent of capitalism, remanants of former social systems still existed and were in the predominant alongside of burgeoning capitalsim. However Marx turned out to be right about the eventual subsumption of those systems to capitalism...My point is that we have not arrived at a stage of pure Empire and Hardt and Negri clearly say this. The fact that there are still nation-states and they still exercise power does not NECESSARILY mean that Empire is not a growing tendancy. It does not in itself refute Negri's theory.
Empire was written before 9/11. I have translated several texts (most notably Negri's discussion of Empire post 9/11 in the interview done with Multitudes. It might be a good idea if the article read some of those. I am willing to send that article out to people who want to read it, or point them to places on the web where they might read it and other documents.
Anyway, the problem with this article is that it wants to absolutize everything Hardt and Negri have said. Hardt and Negri speak of the revolutionary potential of immaterial labor and Brennan wants to pretend that Hardt and Negri deny the existence of manual labor. That is what Brennan wants to read in to Hardt and Negri and it is definitely a distortion.
I have noticed that die-hard leninists like Carrol and Yoshie like to attack Empire not directly but through other authors, like Brennan. I dont blame Yoshie for this. I remember some months ago, she attacked it by apparently skimming the book, plucking quotations out of context and sending them to this list. We shall see what the future holds for the left and whether Hardt and Negri's theories will play any role. It is apparent that she never read the book and just wants to attack it on hearsay. She is a cut and paste radical. Carrol is just an leninist asshole that cant let go of his antiquated bolshevik security blanket.
-Thomas
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> The following paragraphs from Brennan identify some
> of the features of
> _Empire_ that make it, in my estimation, utterly
> useless as political
> analysis. Brennan, incidentally, has not only read
> _Empire_ closely, but
> has also read all of Negri's works and the Italian
> writers that Negri
> draws on.
>
> Carrol
>
>
> The economic theory of Empire proves to be a
> minefield, which is, among
> other things, starkly illustrated by the difficulty
> reviewers have had
> in summarizing it. Writing in the London Review of
> Books, Malcolm Bull
> tries his best: "Since Marx had shown that social
> relations were not, in
> fact, the seamless web of bourgeois mythology, but
> rather the
> battlefield of economic conflict, the class struggle
> could be waged more
> effectively if the working class disengaged from
> waged labour and sought
> autonomy for itself."14 This primary postulate of
> the book that which
> must be allowed for everything else to follow can be
> more baldly put:
> liberation is achieved by declaring oneself
> "autonomous," by
> "disengaging" from labor. Autonomy is about
> proclaiming autonomy. Not
> only Bull but other reviewers like Gopal
> Balakrishnan and John
> Kraniauskas have had trouble convincingly
> characterizing the substance
> of the argument because it is so obviously
> tautological.15 It is an
> inauspicious beginning for a project that Bull,
> apparently without
> irony, dubs "the most successful work of political
> theory to come from
> the Left for a generation."16
>
> If it is odd to propose an economic analysis of the
> condition of labor
> by recusing labor from the economy, what follows is
> far more formulaic
> than an apparently radical proposition might lead
> one to expect. For the
> portrait of economic change offered by Hardt and
> Negri bears a striking
> resemblance to the sort of analysis routinely
> offered by The Economist
> and the Wall Street Journal: namely, that capitalism
> has abruptly
> realigned its economic priorities in favor of the
> intellectual component
> in formerly manual work, a process to which the new
> Italians assign the
> term immaterial labor. The language of management
> theory has for over a
> decade bulged with a figural repertoire demoting
> sweat and muscle in
> favor of "skills," "insights," "ideas," and "speed."
> It is now little
> more than a cliché of the management genre. And yet,
> apart from the
> belatedness of "discovering" this largely fictional
> fact about the new
> economy, this is a scenario that Empire's authors do
> not merely lament.
> Rather like the columnists of the business press,
> they are encouraged by
> this systemic shift (in much the way that in the
> early 1990s the
> post-Fordist critics of "New Times" discussed the
> oppositional potential
> of consumption and the attendant subversiveness of
> the decentering
> introduced by niche marketing).17 While enlivening
> its terminologies by
> placing them in new philosophical registers, the
> authors' devotion to
> New Times credos is unwavering. 18
>
> Against the backdrop of a vast manual system of
> interlocking, armed work
> farms in the clothing industry, the prison-labor
> system, massive new
> infrastructural projects (in the laying of fiber
> optic cable, for
> example), and new arctic drilling ventures, the
> world economy is for
> Hardt and Negri resolutely "post-industrial." Even
> as Brussels vetoes
> U.S. corporate mergers, George W. Bush raises steel
> tariffs, and Chile
> indicts Henry Kissinger as a material witness in the
> trial of General
> Augusto Pinochet, the nation-state, we are told, has
> lost all
> sovereignty. In what can only be called a bracero
> economy of controlled
> "illegal" immigration and the reinstitution of
> slavery (in the Chinese
> tenement halls of the United States as well as in
> rural Sudan and
> Myanmar), we are told that knowledge rather than
> brute physicality is
> the constituent element of new labor. Consequently,
> the supersession of
> manual by mental or immaterial labor turns out to be
> a matter of faith
> rather than anything resembling an analysis of the
> record.
>
> NOTES
>
> 14. Malcolm Bull, "You Can't Build a New Society
> with a Stanley Knife,"
> review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in London
> Review of Books, 4 Oct.
> 2001, p. 3.
>
> 15. Although invariably marked by circumspection,
> not all of the public
> response has been adulatory. Gopal Balakrishnan
> faults Empire for its
> "series of dubious assumptions" (Gopal Balakrishnan,
> "Virgilian
> Visions," review of Empire, by Hardt and Negri, in
> New Left Review 5
> [Sept.Oct. 2000]: 145); John Kraniauskas is
> skeptical of the book's
> "neo-positivist ontology of becoming" (John
> Kraniauskas, "Empire, or
> Multitude: Transnational Negri," review of Empire,
> by Hardt and Negri,
> in Radical Philosophy 103 [Sept.Oct. 2003]: 35).
>
> 16. At times dismissive of Empire's argument, Bull
> too is circumspect.
> He swings from condescension to overpraise, as
> though worried that a
> blunter contestation on his part would consign him
> under the current
> hegemony to the ranks of the out-of-touch. When one
> reflects on what
> books are excluded by Bull's judgmentAlexander
> Cockburn's Corruptions of
> Empire, Thomas Frank's One Market under God, Ellen
> Meiksins Wood's The
> Pristine Culture of Capitalism, John Ross's Shadows
> of Tender Fury,
> Fredric Jameson's The Cultural Turn, and Giovanni
> Arrighi's The Long
> Twentieth Century the statement seems not only
> unmeasured, but absurd.
>
> 17. "New Times" as a purported cultural dominant is
> associated with
> circles around the (now-defunct) British journal
> Marxism Today in the
> late 1980s and early 1990s. Several writers argued
> that systemic
> transformations in capitalism had forced the Left to
> place a new
> emphasis on consumerism, abandon the emphasis on
> industrial labor, and
> jettison the goals of the welfare state. See New
> Times: The Changing
> Face of Politics in the 1990s, ed. Stuart Hall and
> Martin Jacques
> (London, 1990).
>
> 18. One notes here a new and different dilemma in
> cultural theory about
> which very little has been written: distraction.
> There are in practice
> too many distractions in the course of reading a
> book like Empire to be
> deterred by its preparatory ideas. They may nag at
> the reader's
> attention, but since there is already so much that
> needs a response, he
> or she conspires in solidifying its assumptions
> further by failing to
> contest them and does so by constraint because the
> debate has already
> moved on to another place. To question the
> predicates, at any rate, is
> seen as lagging behind the game, for the
> participants have already
> agreed to agree about ideas whose truth-value is
> based above all on
> their prevalence.
>
=== message truncated ===
===== "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."
"Money eats quality and shits out quantity" -William Burroughs
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